Response to Anna Ornstein

The narration of trauma is a heroic accomplishment, not a baseline measure of the survival of a soul. It reassures those of us who have not yet been traumatized that we too might survive; it suggests that the world can make sense again, that fate can be restored to the fateless. In other words, the narration of trauma acts to preserve hope in the face of horror: it is a refusal of psychic death, individual and collective. People who cannot narrate trauma may be very much alive in every possible sense of the word, but not able to shape their experience into the very specific structure that is “narrative”: a chain of events that are linked in some causal formation, in which there is a sense of closure and, ideally, a closure that confers meaning.

Many events and experiences seem to refuse this structure. And many writers have, in turn, refused the limitations of narrative. Thomas Hardy is probably the most famous example of a writer who turned away from and against this form. After writing many novels that we now consider to be among the greatest of the nineteenth century, he abruptly and permanently stopped writing them after Jude the Obscure in 1896. He came to distrust narrative as a too-rigid container of human experience and turned to lyric poetry for the rest of his life: a distinctly nonnarrative form as he practiced it.

The particular consolation of narrative, I think, is that it restores the time in which ordinary living takes place; it suggests that the survivors of enormous trauma and tragedy can resume ordinary lives; it marks an end, a limit, to a certain intensity of horror. It recounts not only experience, but its containment, and to an extent suggested most powerfully in the very fact of its being written down, the mastery or refusal of the ruination that certain horrific experience seems all too capable of producing. I would like to end my response as I ended my earlier paper, with my gratitude to Sophia Richman and Anna Ornstein for their memoirs, and